


Tales

by Khashana, read by Khashana (Khashana)



Series: Disrespect!verse [12]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ADHD, ADHD Aang, Alternate Universe – College/University, Autistic Zuko, Background Suki/Sokka, Casually traumatized Zuko, Depression, Dissociation, Executive Dysfunction, Friendship, Gender, Graduation, Hyperfixation, Implied/Referenced Self Harm, Katara and Sokka ask for what they need, Linguistics, Nonbinary Character, Other, Suki fights the patriarchy, Toph takes no shit, a truly unreasonable amount of linguistics, complex polycules, complex relationships with sexuality and gender, just because you know a thing is irrational doesn’t mean you stop feeling it, mai/toph are friends with benefits essentially, mailee are a queerplatonic relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28744818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khashana/pseuds/Khashana, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khashana/pseuds/read%20by%20Khashana
Summary: Tales from Zuko's junior year.
Relationships: The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong/Mai/Ty Lee
Series: Disrespect!verse [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782586
Comments: 83
Kudos: 184





	1. Aang

**Author's Note:**

> It's the penultimate fic, guys, we're so close! I've already got the majority of the finale written (since I had to make sure everything I needed to foreshadow ended up in this).  
> We'll begin with Aang, and an extremely self-indulgent love letter to my major.  
> Shoutout to Will for helping make this entire last seven parts come together.

_Suki: Dinner?_

_Zuko: Sure_

_Katara: Give me 10, I’ll meet you there_

_Toph: Sure_

_Sokka: We’ll grab a table_

“Is Aang not coming?” Sokka asks halfway through dinner first week junior year, which makes Zuko notice that Aang isn’t there.

“He didn’t say anything in the group chat,” says Katara, frowning as she checks it, and then sends a message. Aang doesn’t respond. That’s the odd part—it’s entirely in character for Aang to text that he’s on his way, and then get distracted. This is different.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” says Sokka.

When they all finish, and Aang still hasn’t so much as texted back, they all traipse over to his dorm and knock on the door.

“Hey guys,” says Aang, opening the door. “Dinner? Wow, I’m starving.”

“It’s _past_ dinner,” says Zuko. “We texted you.” Aang frowns and goes back to his bed, where his phone is sitting in plain sight. He picks it up and presses the home button, and his eyebrows shoot up.

“I straight up did not notice any of these. Fuck, it’s way later than I thought it was.”

“What were you doing?” asks Katara curiously.

“Homework! I know, I know, but it’s really interesting!” He holds up his Linguistics textbook, which is about two inches thick. “We’re doing morphology, and I guess I got sucked in. Dining hall’s closed now, huh?” He taps at his phone.

“How long have you been working on it?”

“No idea. Since I got out of my religious studies class?” He counts on his fingers. “Jesus. That makes four hours.”

“If you’re going to hyperfixate so hard you don’t hear your phone, maybe you need to keep the sound on?” says Zuko.

“I’ll never remember to turn it off again when I go into class,” says Aang, frowning. “What if we switched to Facebook Messenger? I can keep that open in a tab and my laptop sound on.”

“You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac,” puts in Suki. Sokka shoulder-checks her.

“That’s all very well and good,” interjects Toph, “but did you figure out what you’re doing for dinner?”

“Oh!” Aang returns to his phone. “Right. Contacts list. Campus Corner. Call.” He taps his fingers on his leg as he waits for the local delivery place to pick up. “Hi, I’d like to make an order of mac ‘n’ cheese. …No drink, but I’ll have a slice of apple pie! …Oh, hold on.” He fishes his wallet out and reads off his debit card number. After he hangs up, he turns to them excitedly and says, “Speaking of apple pie, have you ever thought about what the word unlockable means?”

“How the _fuck_ is that ‘speaking of apple pie,’” says Toph.

“Cause the pie’s expensive, but not unaffordable, and unaffordable’s the same kind of word as unlockable, but it’s not as interesting. It breaks down into three parts, right? Un-, lock, and -able. The -able suffix turns it from a verb into an adjective, and the un- prefix is negation.”

“Right,” says Katara.

“But what order do you add them in?” His eyes are huge. “You could add the un- first, and then you go from ‘lock’ to ‘unlock’ and then when you tack on the suffix you get ‘thing which can be unlocked.’ But you could also start with ‘lock’ to ‘lockable,’ a thing which can be locked, and then tack on the prefix, and now you have ‘ _a thing which can’t be locked._ ’ Isn’t that _cool_?”

“That _is_ cool,” says Katara, thinking about it. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone use ‘unlockable’ in real life.”

“Unaffordable isn’t as interesting because ‘unafford’ isn’t a word so it’s pretty obvious what order the morphemes go on in. Anyway, I’ve done all the homework plus all the rest of the problems in the chapter and now I’m in the middle of next class’s reading.”

“Are you done with what’s due tomorrow?” asks Zuko. Aang slumps.

“No,” he says dejectedly. “This is so much more interesting.”

It’s…something, watching Aang learn linguistics. Zuko and Suki take turns with intro polisci, and Sokka and Katara lose rock-paper-scissors to Toph for history and religious studies, which none of them have any particular aptitude for—but Aang doesn’t need help focusing on linguistics. Not the same kind of help, anyway.

He drops into a chair at dinner one day, and instead of saying hello, opens with an excited, “Did you know the Inuit don’t really have a million words for snow?”

“Yes?” say Sokka and Katara together, looking confused. Aang looks baffled for a second, and then flushes and drops his head into his hands.

“I forgot who I was talking to,” he mumbles, and the rest of them collapse in laughter. “ _Anyway,_ this dude wrote an essay about it that we had to read for class, and it’s the funniest thing I have ever read in my life, listen.” He rustles around in his backpack. “This is about how at some point, someone will tell you the Inuit have a dozen or twenty or hundreds of words for snow and you have to stand up and contradict them and say…blah blah blah…” He retrieves the printout from his backpack and flips to the back page. “Just two possibly relevant roots: _qanik_ , meaning ‘snow in the air’ or ‘snowflake’, and _aput,_ meaning ‘snow on the ground.’”

“Sounds right,” says Katara. Aang ignores her.

“Then add that you would be interested to know if the speaker can cite any more. This will not make you the most popular person in the room. It will have an effect roughly comparable to pouring fifty gallons of thick oatmeal into a harpsichord during a baroque recital.”

They all lose it a second time, for a completely different reason.

“Fifty gallons of oatmeal? Into a _harpsichord?_ ” chokes Katara.

“That’s so specific!” says Sokka. “’Roughly comparable’?”

“But,” finishes Aang, “it will strike a blow for truth, responsibility, and standards of evidence in linguistics.”

Aang’s midterm paper requires him to interview a bilingual person, and, inspired by that conversation, he chooses Sokka and Katara after getting permission to use both of them from his teacher.

“ _Help,_ ” he says a week later, flinging himself down next to Zuko. “I literally already know all the information that needs to go into this and I need to turn in a draft tomorrow and I haven’t started it.”

It’s trickier, breaking it down into steps from there—‘research’ is usually the first step, and this time it turns out to be ‘figure out what story you want to tell.’ But the paper gets written in the end, and Zuko chastises himself for getting lax. Just because Aang’s hyperfixated on the subject doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have ADHD.

After break, it’s the sounds of language, and Aang spends every spare minute writing down random words phonetically in an incomprehensible script.

“Did you know that the double t in _kitten_ is actually a glottal stop, but the one in _butter_ is a flap, and it’s the _same sound as single R in Spanish?_ ” he says.

“Have you done the homework, though,” says Toph, not really as a question.

“…no, but I’m a week ahead in the textbook!”

Zuko quizzes him on sounds in the weird script.

“You know I have absolutely no idea if you’re getting these right,” he says.

“Yeah, but I _know_ if I don’t know it.”

“…If you say so.”

“Oh, neat! Es and esh are in complementary distribution in Korean. They’re part of the same sound unit.”

“Wait, what?”

Aang looks up from his homework, eyes bright. “So, people’s brains have, like, slots! And sounds that are _technically_ different will sometimes fit into the same slot. Like in English, T with a little puff of air and T without a little puff of air are in the same slot. We consider them both part of T and we don’t really notice when we have one or the other. But in lots of languages, those are as different as B and P to an English speaker!”

“Really?” says Katara.

“Oh, yeah, that,” says Zuko. “Mandarin does that.”

“I think I read that all the Chinese languages do that. Or maybe just a lot of them? So does Tibetan. And Thai, and Korean.”

“Japanese _doesn’t,_ though. _Weird._ I never noticed that.” Zuko pauses to reevaluate all his languages.

“ _Right?_ ” Aang looks overjoyed. “And in some languages it matters how long the vowel is! Japanese does do that! And Mandarin doesn’t!”

“Oh, Inuktitut does that!” says Sokka, looking interested.

Before they know it, they’re knee deep in Wikipedia looking up sound systems, and _all_ of them would have forgotten to finish the next day’s homework if it weren’t for Toph.

“Aang, we should really look at your finals schedule,” says Katara.

“Papers in all of them,” he says, with an absolutely devastated expression. “Except linguistics. We only had the midterm paper, the final’s a test. Professor Ng’s giving us a review sheet.”

Zuko doesn’t get through life expecting things to be easy. But Aang’s review is…easy. He’s almost afraid to think it too hard.

“How do we know form and meaning are processed distinctly in the brain?” he reads from the review sheet.

“Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia occur due to damage on opposite sides of the brain. Broca’s aphasia involves breakdown of form, and Wernicke’s involves breakdown of meaning.”

“How do we know people aren’t genetically predisposed to learn their language?”

“Babies show sensitivity to all sorts of differences, and slowly stop reacting the ones that aren’t contrastive in the languages spoken around them.”

“How do we know sign languages are real languages?”

“They have literally all the same properties and do the same things in the brain.” Zuko decides that’s good enough and moves on.

“What’s an infix?”

“It’s like a prefix or a suffix, but it goes in the middle. There are only two in English, and they’re basically the same word.”

“What is it?” That’s not part of the question, but Zuko’s curious.

“Fucking!” Aang grins hugely.

Zuko makes a confused noise.

“Abso-fucking-lutely. Massa-freaking-chusetts. It falls in the middle of the root—not just between two affixes, like un-fucking-believable—and there are actual _rules_ about where you can put it. It has to have a certain number of syllables, and it has to be right before the stressed syllable!”

“Damn.”

_Aang: Got my grades back and you won’t believe this_

_Aang: I have a 3.8 in ling_

_Aang: I’ve never gotten a grade that good in my life_

_Aang: I think I’m gonna major in it_

_*Everyone is typing*_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you can’t tell, I have a degree in linguistics, and I am massively projecting onto Aang here. I too did not discover linguistics until sophomore year (because of a snowstorm! It’s a weird sliding-doors moment) and loved every moment of my intro class. Everything here comes from that class—to write this chapter, I dug my old notes out (from 2014, I’m starting to feel old). The fifty gallons of oatmeal quote is a real one from a real paper, which is just as hilarious as it sounds, and you can read the page in question [here](https://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-Language/dp/0226685349#reader_0226685349) if you use the ‘look inside’ feature and search any of the relevant words. The bit starting from “this will not make you the most popular person in the room” is one of my favorite uses of the English language, but using the longer quote for context—between the quote itself and the name of the paper, you have no idea how tricky it was to write that scene without misquoting or using the E-slur. Shoutout to its author, Geoffrey K. Pullum, whose linguistics essays all sound like that and are a joy to read.


	2. Katara

He gets the call in the middle of class, but Katara _doesn’t call him,_ so he slips out the door and answers. It’s probably a butt dial.

It isn’t.

“Zuko,” says Katara, and there is something very wrong with her voice. “I need help.”

“What do you need?”

“I’m standing in the CVS holding a package of razor blades, and if I move I’m going to buy them.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He doesn’t even go back into class, just starts jogging. He stays on the line with Katara, even though he doesn’t know what to say, and she doesn’t say anything either. When he’s forced to wait at a crosswalk, he puts her on speaker and texts Suki.

_Katara needs me. Can you grab my stuff?_

She sends him back worried emojis and _Of course._

He finds Katara exactly as she said he would, holding the package in one hand and the phone to her ear in the other. He hangs up and rushes over to her.

“Hey,” he says. She lowers the phone and turns to look at him, anguish on her face like he’s never seen it. “Can you hand me those?”

It takes her visible effort to release her fingers from the packaging, but she manages, and he takes them from her and puts them back on the shelf. Hands free, he folds her into a hug. She goes easily, and she feels so light, like a stiff breeze would knock her over. His heart hurts for her.

“Is there anything you actually needed here?” he asks, noting that she doesn’t have anything else with her.

“My prescription,” she says in that weird voice, so Zuko walks her down to the pharmacy without letting go and waits with her while she gives her name and birth date and hands over her credit card.

They walk back to campus in silence. Zuko’s dorm is closer, so he steers them there.

“Where are we going?” Katara asks finally.

“My room?”

“Why Zuko, I thought you didn’t swing that way.”

He frowns at her. “I don’t. I’m not _hitting_ on you, Katara, that would be really fucked up.”

“I was trying to make a joke,” she tells him. “It didn’t work very well. Sorry.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone right now, and my room is closer. But we can go back to yours if you’d rather.”

“I don’t care.” Her voice is flat again, so Zuko leads her up two flights of stairs to his room and tries to remember what you do for someone who’s dissociating.

“Do you want something to eat? I think I have some chocolate.” She shakes her head. On a whim, Zuko reaches under the rumpled covers and extracts the stuffed animal there. She takes it without looking. He sits next to her on the bed and frantically googles it.

Oh. Right. Duh.

“Can you tell me five things you can see?” He pulls his weighted blanket from where it’s stuffed into the crack between the bed and the wall and drapes it over her lap. She pulls it up to her shoulders.

“My dress. Your sweater. The floor. Duck plushie. The bedspread.”

“Four things you can hear?”

She pauses to listen. “The vent. One of your neighbors talking. Someone walking by. Your breathing.”

“Three things you can feel?”

“The floor against my feet. The bed I’m sitting on. This duck plushie.” She looks at it again and moves her arms to see the shell. “Or… Zuko, what exactly _is_ this?”

“Uh. A turtleduck.” He feels his face go red.

“A turtleduck.”

“My mom made it,” he mutters. “I guess I made it up when I was a kid so she made me one.”

“That’s so sweet.” She hugs it tighter and sort of curls in on herself.

“What do you need?” God, he hopes she knows now.

“Can you, um. Hold my hands? So I can’t do anything?”

“Yeah, sure.” He puzzles logistics for a few seconds. “Is it okay if I, like, hug you?” She nods, and he carefully wraps his arms around her, crossing them so she’s completely encircled and wrapping his hands around her wrists, both covered by the blanket. She sags into him, and he squeezes tighter.

Zuko’s pretty much used up his morning’s allotment of words, but Katara doesn’t seem to mind sitting in silence.

Suki turns up an unknown amount of time later with Zuko’s backpack.

“Hey,” she says. “Everything okay?”

“I think so,” says Katara, and pulls away. Zuko lets go.

“Was it something specific, or did it come out of nowhere? Or do you not want to talk about it?” he asks quietly.

“Came out of nowhere.” She sighs. “It’s been _so long_. Why does this still happen?”

“Addiction,” says Zuko simply.

Katara lets out a frustrated noise and tugs sharply on a lock of hair. “You make it sound like you’re the one with all the experience being clean. It’s been longer for me!”

Alarms go off in Zuko’s head, and he stays very still. _Katara isn’t really mad at you,_ he reminds himself. _Not mad at you. Not mad at you._

She doesn’t appear to notice, but she flops down on the bed and stares at him sadly. “It’s been a while since I even thought about it,” she says quietly

“That’s progress, right?” puts in Suki, still in the doorway. “That’s what I’ve always heard. It’s just about getting to having more good days and less bad ones.”

“I don’t want you to tell me what I already know, I want to be upset about it,” says Katara, looking over at her.

“Oh,” says Suki, finally setting her own backpack down, “ _that_ we can do. You wanna destroy something? I have an essay that got a bad grade here you can rip into shreds.”

Katara smiles. “That sounds nice, actually. But only if you do it with me.”

“Deal.” Suki rips a chunk of pages away from their staple and hands it to Katara, then divides the rest in half and gives one pile to Zuko. “Fuck depression!” She rips the top page down the center.

“ _Fuck_ depression!” Katara actually laughs.

“ _Fuck depression!”_


	3. Sokka

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again thank you to ravenreyamidala and HermioneGirl96 for looking this one over!

_Yo whatcha doing?_ texts Sokka the next evening.

 _Running errands,_ says Zuko. _Why?_

_Oh nvm then_

Zuko squints at his phone suspiciously. He had expected something more along the lines of “ _dude f that and come over, we’re playing Egyptian Ratscrew.”_

 _On-campus errands,_ he clarifies. _Mail and library books and some other shit. What’s up?_

_Can you come over when you have a minute?_

The library books will keep for a day, and he happens to be walking right past Sokka’s dorm. He swipes his card and goes in.

Sokka’s door is open, and he’s sitting on the bed on his phone.

“Dude,” he says, noticing Zuko, “I didn’t mean drop everything and come over right now.”

“You sound weird,” says Zuko. “And the library books can wait.”

Sokka snickers a little, then sobers. “Come here?”

Zuko drops his bag on the floor and climbs up on the bed. Sokka stares at the wall instead of looking at Zuko, which is just fine by him.

“Katara told me what happened,” says Sokka finally. “I think so I didn’t hear it from you or Suki. And I’m just…having emotions about her calling you instead of me.”

Zuko shifts uncomfortably.

“I get why. I totally do. But because I wasn’t there, I’m just having trouble processing. And I’m allowed to ask for help when I need it,” he adds under his breath, like he’s reminding himself.

“Yeah, of course. But what am I supposed to do about it?”

Sokka snickers again. “Zuko, man, I am so glad I know to take everything you say at absolute face value and not filter it through any of my twenty-one years of socialization. Do you want a script for this interaction, or nah?”

“Sure.” He knows by now that the first sentence is gentle teasing and the second is a genuine offer that he can accept or decline without consequences. He could maybe have come up with an acceptable way to phrase it, were he talking to someone besides Sokka—but more scripts is better.

“You say ‘what do you need from me.’ Or ‘what can I do to help.’ Which, I know, doesn’t sound like you at all. The sacrifices we make for arbitrary social rules. Anyway, I answer, ‘can you just sit and keep me company while my brain tries to convince my heart that I’m not failing my baby sister?’”

Zuko nods, makes himself comfortable, and nudges Sokka gently. “For what it’s worth, you’re _not_ failing your baby sister.”

“That’s…helping, actually, keep talking?”

“Okay. She called me because I’ve been there, so she knew I wouldn’t panic on her and I could help her without her needing to walk me through how to do it. She was dissociating, she couldn’t explain what she needed.”

Sokka takes a deep breath and lets it out. “And you helped her. You didn’t leave her alone.”

“I stayed with her until she was okay again,” Zuko confirms.

“Okay.” To Zuko’s surprise, Sokka grabs his hand and clings. “Sorry, I just—”

“It’s okay.” Zuko wiggles it into a more comfortable position and holds back. This, he knows how to do.

“Why are you always in the same classes as Suki, anyways? She’s a year ahead,” says Sokka after a few seconds, apropos of nothing.

“Similar interests. It’s not like mechE where you’re expected to take certain courses at certain years because they build on each other. In polisci you’ve got junior sem and senior sem, and other than that you just pick the classes that sound interesting and make sure you’re getting enough 300-levels, but that’s not hard.”

“Huh. Do you want to be a lawyer, too?”

“Don’t think so. I majored in polisci because it interests me, not because I know what I’m doing with my life.”

“I want to go to grad school. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. There are so many options.”

Out of curiosity, Zuko pulls out his laptop and googles accredited mechanical engineering master’s programs.

After two hours, he’s cross-referenced it with College Prowler’s ratings, tossed out the poorly rated ones, and plotted the rest on My Maps. He emails it to Sokka, who has at some point reclaimed his hand to type.

“What’s this?” Sokka asks after a minute. He opens the map and mouses over the pins. “Zuko—did you just plot all the good master’s programs on the planet?”

“Not the planet. Just mainly English-speaking countries. And all of Canada, including the provinces that aren’t.”

“What do the colors mean?”

“Light blue are within a couple hours of a national park or a coastal research station. I don’t know where exactly Katara plans to end up, but those are kind of her main options. Green are within a couple hours of your home. Dark blue are within a couple hours of here, and red are near Suki. Everything else is grey. I almost tossed them out, but for all I know one of those has a researcher or whatever you really wanna work with.”

Sokka sets his laptop to the side and throws both arms around Zuko, who catches him, surprised, and hugs back.

“It never even occurred to me to look at it by distance. And you took into account everyone I might wanna visit. _Thank you._ ”

“Remember you still have to pick a school for _you_ , though,” Zuko cautions. “Don’t cross off a school with a program you want to go to just because it isn’t near Katara or whoever.”

“I know. It’s a place to start. But a place to start is important, okay?” Sokka clasps his shoulder firmly.

(Sokka doesn’t treat Katara differently at all the next day—at least as far as Zuko’s autistic ass can tell, but Katara isn’t usually subtle about being irritated with her brother—and he wishes there was a non-weird way to say he’s proud of him for that.)


	4. Suki

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Playlist of all the songs that make an appearance in this chapter.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/65sZsEfr6Sv1whhaR8fxq3)

“Time for my war paint, huh?” says Suki, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Zuko cocks his head and watches curiously from her bed as she puts on red eyeshadow, perfect winged eyeliner, and thick lines of eye black like an athlete.

“How do I look?” she asks, turning around to show Zuko.

“Like you’re ready to kill a man,” Zuko says truthfully.

“Good. Ah, shit.” She snags a tissue and catches the tears before they ruin her makeup. Zuko holds an arm out wordlessly, and Suki plops down next to him and leans into the hug.

He doesn’t tell her it’ll be all right. That’s not what they do. He just lets her arrange her head on his shoulder and compose herself.

“I’m going to miss you,” Zuko says eventually.

“Shut up before you make me cry again.”

He grins. “Yes, ma’am.”

They walk down to the green together before they separate, Suki heading off toward the seniors and Zuko joining Sokka with the juniors. The sun is setting, and most of the campus is spread out on the green, grouped by year. There are about three hundred people in each class, but not everyone turns out for Songs Night. Most seniors are there, and a lot of the frosh, but less sophomores and juniors. It’s still hundreds of people crammed together, though, and Zuko tries not to get too overwhelmed.

Someone passes them sparklers and songbooks, and Zuko flips through his, reminding himself what the junior class’s songs are.

Someone up in the bell tower rings the bell loudly, over and over, and everyone quiets. Sparklers light up all over the green until Zuko has to shut his eyes.

The frosh have Stand By Me, Build Me Up Buttercup, and I Will Survive, all traditional. The sophomores have Let It Go, All Star (which he thinks he can hear Toph belting at the top of her lungs), and Dancing Queen, all pop. Then it’s their turn.

The junior songs are newer, but they’re less “bouncy joy” and more “make all these already emotional people cry.” Zuko has to open his eyes for this part, but as long as he focuses on his songbook, he’s good.

Home by Phillip Phillips is the first song. Zuko’s throat tightens with nostalgia. This won’t be his home forever, but it speaks so much to his experience.

_Settle down, it’ll all be made clear, don’t pay no mind to the demons they fill you with fear_

_The trouble it might drag you down, if you get lost you can always be found._

_Just know you’re not alone, ‘cause I’m gonna make this place your home._

Then it’s Lean On Me.

_Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on_

_For it won’t be long ‘til I’m gonna need somebody to lean on._

Last is It’s Time.

_Now don’t you understand, that I’m never changing who I am._

Then it’s time for the seniors, who basically get to pick whatever they want. They start with Don’t Stop Believin’, then Defying Gravity. Sparklers start to go out, and Zuko can see again.

Last, it’s Closer to Fine by Indigo Girls.

_I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind_ , they shout. _Got my paper and I was free!_ They erupt into cheers, and it takes a moment to get back into the swing of the song. _There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line. And the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine._

When they finish, everyone starts to stand up, expecting that to be the end, but somebody—Suki—jumps to her feet and screams, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” A group of girls Zuko recognizes as Suki’s friends—there’s her ex, Rangi, and Rangi’s fiancée, Kyoshi—race out from behind the bell tower, stark naked but for their shoes as the bell rings repeatedly. Suki whips off her dress, revealing the fact that she has no underwear on, and joins them as they streak a wide circle around the green, singing something.

_As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days_

_The rising of the women means the rising of the race._

_No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,_

_But a sharing of life’s glories: bread and roses, bread and roses._

_Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes_

_Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses._

They disappear behind the bell tower again, and everything breaks out into commotion. Sokka is absolutely losing it next to Zuko.

“Did you know she was going to do that?” he wheezes.

“No. Did you?”

“She said she had something special planned. She didn’t say what.”

The girls emerge from behind the bell tower, dressed once more. Someone has fetched Suki’s dress for her. They rejoin their respective classes, and the three younger groups gather in two bunched, messy lines, forming a kind of gauntlet. Somebody starts playing The Cave by Mumford & Sons loudly, and, one at a time, the seniors walk down the center. It’s slow going, because their friends reach out to slap them on the backs, hug them, and sometimes whisper a few words. A lot of people are crying.

Suki reaches them, and Sokka pulls her in for a quick hug and kiss before passing her to Zuko, who wraps his arms around her. “Give Harvard hell for me,” he tells her.

“Absolutely.”

The line ends at an ancient arch freestanding at the edge of the green. One by one, the seniors reach the end and step through. It’s the college’s oldest and most strictly adhered-to superstition: no one is allowed to walk through the arch until Songs Night of their senior year. The cap and gown march in two weeks is for the parents—in the minds of every student, this is their graduation, surrounded by the love of their peers. Zuko kind of wants to cry.

Sokka _is_ crying, beside him, just a little. “I’m gonna miss her so much,” he says, voice wavering, and Zuko pulls him close with one arm.

“Me too.”

Suki’s crying, too, when she finds her way back to them, black streaking her face.

“I can’t believe I’m leaving,” she says. “It doesn’t feel real. I’m gonna be _twenty-two on Wednesday._ ”

There’s really not much they can say to that. They collect the others and go back to her room and pile on top of her, and Suki, normally the stoic one, clings tight until she falls asleep in Sokka’s arms. Zuko smiles at the sight and shuts her door behind him as he leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, the war paint line is not just an excuse to use Kyoshi Warrior makeup—it’s a reference to this picture of me at my equivalent experience.
> 
> And here is a shot where the snapchat box isn't covering up the stars:
> 
> To the four or five people in the comments who’ve recognized what college I name all the buildings after—it was interesting trying to get the vibe of Traditions across without giving too much away! “Home” was my class song, and I almost cry every time I hear it. Writing this made me very emotional about graduating, even though that was almost four years ago now. This chapter absolutely is a love letter to my alma mater.


	5. Toph

“So I’ll see you in a couple weeks, I guess?”

“Zuko, I’m not going home for summer break this year,” says Mai, and Zuko frowns at the phone.

“How come?”

“I’m officially not going home again. Ever.” Her brow furrows slightly. Zuko doesn’t know what it means.

“Oh. Wow.” He knew this was coming, but he didn’t really process that helping Mai escape from her house meant she _wouldn’t be at her house anymore._ “Where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to stay with Toph and June right now.”

Zuko nods, not really sure what he’s expected to say.

“I bet June would let you come visit if you wanted.”

“Yeah?” He doesn’t get to see Mai in person for the whole school year, and he’s kind of attached to spending breaks with her now.

“I’ll mention it to her.”

“Yo Sparky, what are you doing the second week of June?”

“Sitting at home. Why?”

“It’s Ty Lee’s birthday, so she’s coming to visit Mai, and if you wanted to come then too, you could visit them both. And me, of course, but that goes without saying.”

Zuko…was not aware that Mai and Ty Lee were close enough to visit over the summer.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll message Uncle.”

Arriving at Toph’s house is weird because Ty Lee flings herself into his arms, Toph punches him in the arm, and Mai nods at him from the other side of the room.

“Zuko, I’m guessing?” says June, who turns out to tower over Zuko. She tosses hair out of her face and holds out her hand. It’s a firm handshake. “Ty Lee can show you to your room.”

“Yeah!” says Ty Lee, and drags Zuko by the hand to a roomy bedroom done up in dark red and purple and sporting two doubles. “That’s your bed. Me and Mai are in the other one. You’re gay, right? So it’s okay if you room with us?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Sometimes Mai goes to bed with Toph but she usually wakes up here ‘cause Toph likes her bed to herself.”

Zuko nods slowly.

“Mai shares with you?”

“More accurate to say I share with her. It’s her room. But yeah, when she’s not with Toph! We’re practicing for rooming together next year.”

Zuko accepts the first point, elects to ignore that rooming together does not generally involve sharing a bed, and moves on. He takes a moment to look Ty Lee up and down.

“You look happy,” he says quietly. She gives him a smile much smaller than the grins she’s been showering him with since he walked in the door, but he thinks it might be a more important smile.

“I am.”

Zuko is not the most observant person in the world, but he can hardly fail to notice the way Ty Lee curls into Mai on the couch when they gather in the den to catch up. Or the way Mai strokes Ty Lee’s hair as she makes them all take a Buzzfeed quiz to tell them which obscure breed of dog they are (Zuko is a Basenji, apparently).

Even less so the way Toph tugs Mai down and kisses her on their way to dinner.

They watch The Emperor’s New Groove with audio descriptions on afterwards. About halfway through, Ty Lee gets up for more gummi worms and Toph steals her seat to run a hand over Mai’s thigh. Mai pretends to ignore this for a minute or two, during which Ty Lee comes back and sits next to Zuko instead. Eventually, Mai cracks and grabs Toph’s face, kissing her firmly. Toph climbs into her lap. Ty Lee eats a gummi worm and watches the movie.

“Are you okay?” Zuko hisses in her ear.

“What do you mean?”

“With them.” He nods toward the couple making out in the corner.

Ty Lee straightens, affronted. “Zuko, are you asking me if I’m a homophobe?” It’s whispered, but the indignation is clear.

“No! I’m asking you if you’re in love with Mai!”

She softens. “I can love her in whatever way she needs me to. Mai doesn’t like girls.”

Zuko looks pointedly at the couple.

“I don’t think Toph is a _girl_ ,” Ty Lee explains. “And they aren’t dating. It’s all physical.”

Zuko stares at her and absolutely fails to process any of that. She shrugs at him. “It works for us.”

He decides he doesn’t really _need_ to process any of it.

They have a blast, actually. Toph takes them to her martial arts club and kicks everyone’s ass. Possibly because Zuko isn’t expecting her to fight the way she does, but possibly not. Ty Lee drags them to a psychic to celebrate her birthday. They get weird flavors of ice cream at the local shop, visit a cat café, and play a difficult card game called Fish with one of June’s friends.

(“Go Fish?” Zuko asked skeptically.

“Same basic object. Same basic gameplay. But you’re collecting half suits instead of four of a kind, you’re collecting as a team, and you’re not allowed to talk to your partners. It’s really a test of how good you are at counting cards.”

“…Oh.”

It’s _difficult,_ keeping an entire deck of cards’ locations in your head, Zuko finds. He suspects Sokka would love it and resolves to bring it back to college with him.)

Through all of it, he watches the others interact.

Mai and Ty Lee act sort of like girlfriends and sort of like really close, cuddly friends. They’re clearly devoted to each other, but they don’t kiss. Mai and Toph, on the other hand, are clearly close and obviously care about each other, but don’t act like girlfriends at all until one of them wants to make out.

One night, near the end of their stay, Mai has vanished off to Toph’s room for sex, and Zuko and Ty Lee are dicking around on their phones in Mai’s room. Zuko tries to figure out how to bring up the subject again, and then remembers Ty Lee has known him since childhood and stops bothering to pretend to be neurotypical.

“So Mai gets sex from Toph and cuddles from you and none of it is romantic, actually.”

“Basically.”

“And you’re really, honestly, okay with that?”

Ty Lee puts down her phone and gives him that little smile again. “I’ve been in love before, Zuko. In high school. When you recognize what’s happening, you _do_ actually have some measure of control over it, despite what the whole world would have you believe. And maybe _you_ can’t decide to love someone as your everything without it being romantic, but I can. If Mai decided tomorrow she was actually into women, then sure, I’d fall in love with her, easy. But as it is? Zuko, I don’t even feel weird about referring to her as my sister around people you can’t say ‘polycule’ around.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I don’t know you anywhere near well enough to _not_ trust you to take care of your own heart when you say you’ve got it handled.”

She laughs, and that’s that.

He doesn’t really know what to do with the “Toph doesn’t count as a woman” thing, but then, on their last day, Toph wears a headband with a familiar flag down to breakfast. At first he thinks it’s the aro flag, but it’s not—the same colors, but in a symmetrical pattern.

“Hey Toph? Are you agender?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, I guess. If I have to pick a gender. I don’t really _get_ gender.”

“Are you fine with she/her?”

“Yeah, Sparky, chill. I really don’t give enough shits about gender to go trying to deal with a different set of pronouns. I only even have this because someone was trying to support a small business selling Pride gear and picked it up for me.”

“Think people will call me a special snowflake if I say I’m a straight bisexual for being attracted to you?” asks Mai wryly.

“Eh, who gives a fuck. If you like that, use it. If you wanna use one or the other, do it. If you wanna say fuck it and call yourself queer, do _that._ It’s what the word’s for.” Toph stuffs a muffin into her mouth.

“Who gives a fuck, indeed. I think I’m fine not bothering to label it. Call me whatever’s convenient.”

“You identify as an enigma,” puts in Ty Lee, and that gets an actual smile out of Mai.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap for _Tales,_ folks! I will see you next at the ~series finale~

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](https://khashanakalashtar.tumblr.com/tagged/disrespect-verse)


End file.
